Quick Post (I Promise) – Updates and Staff Safety in Public Libraries

Hello minions…er, readers,

I’m going to make this short and sweet. Some quick updates and one quick topic for you to digest.

First, updates:

1. I’ll be giving a presentation at the upcoming June New Jersey Library Association Conference in Atlantic City. I’ll be giving a presentation with another librarian, Kate Vasilik of the Piscataway Public Library, who has been doing some pretty sweet programming and projects over there! Our talk will be “Programming for the 20s/30s Crowd”, which is an elusive patron group for public libraries.  I’ve got lots of ideas and I think a pretty good amount of experience in this field. More details coming soon, which I’ll post as I put things together. I can give you at least one tip right now that will be included: food and food based programs AND/OR alcohol = young people attending.
2. It looks like I’ve agreed to become the Vice President for the NJLA Reference Section. This also means that by default I will become the President on the Reference Section next year – yerp! Mostly, I think it involves planning the Adult Services Forum event as well as sponsoring programs for the NJLA conference. Could be a bit of lifting, but also a good opportunity. Special thanks to the current President Nick Van Dorn for offering this opportunity for me 🙂
3. The long march of contract negotiations continue with no end in sight….
4. I’m about to launch a staff recommendations blog for my library. Several staff members are involved in the project and we’ll be posting weekly entries on different genres and materials that can be found in library and the BCCLS (Bergen County Cooperative Library System), of which HPL is a member. I’d like to have the blog focus on unique items and genres that people may not normally know about. I put together a quick, simple blog on WordPress, which I think works just fine. I also created policies for use and guidelines for staff concerning social media and the blog – YAWN…are you still awake after that last sentence?? While it hasn’t officially launched yet, here’s a quick sneak peak at the initial article I wrote for the blog. Also, while its not posted yet, one of my awesome colleagues at work wrote a sweet article on various films. Totally looking forward to seeing what she has to write in the future! 🙂

http://hobokenlibrary.wordpress.com/2013/02/18/september-comics-pick-the-boys-by-garth-ennis/

Ok! Updates out of the way. Now, here’s Bill Murray on the cover of GQ recently!

Also, Grateful Dead live in England 1972 Cumberland Blues – Nice! Go listen to it now!

Finally, I’m reading Planetary from Warren Ellis right now, who’s  created/written for some other series comic series like Transmetropolitan and Hellblazer.

 

Moving forward. Today’s brief topic: Safety in libraries.

This is certainly something that I feel is a big topic that does not get almost any mention in library journals and publications. Most people have a few of a library as a quaint, quiet place of study, reading and reflection. If you are forward thinking, you might also see the library as an education and community center with tools, classes, programs and a variety of technological resources.  However, if you frequent a local library that’s located in a urban area, you also might think of a library as place where quite a variety of people frequent, which includes people who are homeless, suffer from mental illness, suffer from addiction, or people who are overly aggressive or violent. This is an unfortunate, but true reality of urban public libraries. Now, this topic certainly deserves a much bigger and researched post, which I will probably do in the near future.

There have been a few very good articles written on this subject in the past by librarians, but unfortunately too infrequently and with no follow-up, community wide research taking place. In public libraries we are often confronted with all of the aforementioned groups of people. At first you want to try and help, as any decent person should want to do I would think. However, you quickly realize that all around you nationally and locally there is a very broken system concerning mental health, poverty and drug rehabilitation. Any local agencies or charities you reach out too inform you that they are doing the best the can (and often are), but that funding and manpower is just not there to tackle such an immense problem. So even if you want to partner with local assistance organizations and/or bring them into the library, often this is simply not possible or only effective in a small way – the group can be present in the library, but there are still many barriers for those who need help actually receiving it or asking for it.

However, there are other aspects to this than simply trying to offer help to those who need it. Unfortunately, you also quickly run into issues where certain patrons can cause other patrons to be disturbed and not be able to enjoy the library. Further, often there are encounters with patrons that range from annoying to very disruptive to downright threatening/violent. Here’s just a few things I encountered/witnessed at my library:

• staff being followed outside of work by aggressive patrons
• patrons screaming at staff (or other patrons) and threatening them
• Variety of intoxicated patrons stumbling, sleeping, yelling, arguing, getting sick, etc, etc.
• public masturbation and viewing pornography on library computers

The list goes on.

We’ve had a very prolonged ‘battle’ so to speak as to how to deal with situations like this. Much of the time the library tried to ignore the problem and basically hope that it would go away and incidents would be isolated. Of course, this is not the case. After months and even years of arguing and serious incidents I spearheaded an effort to at least create new policies with actual consequences for patrons who violated our rules – which could include permanent banning from the library. A few years ago I might have tried to avoid all out bans for patrons, but now I fully supported and proposed this provision. I feel like there needs to be actual consequences for patrons as short term bans or even calling the police can have varied and largely ineffectual results. Even this solution is really not a solution, just an attempt to provide at least some modicum of protection for staff and other patrons.

I don’t have an answer to this one. I need to do some research, talk to some other librarians, etc. I feel like with what seems like a rise in random violence in public places, libraries could be especially vulnerable targets. We have some security in the building, but really its limited as its basically a couple of people who have t-shirts that say security but nothing else and no real authority. I’m also of a mindset that arming people in libraries (or any public place, or well, anywhere) is not really a solution and will cause more problems. That’s another debate though.

With a systemic broken system for mental health and poverty I don’t know if there can really be a solution without fixing those two things. If that’s the case, then none of the causes of the problem can really be addressed by libraries. So what to do – best strategies for providing the best possible safety and minimization of problematic situations? Sounds good – just what exactly ARE those best practices?? Turns out- there’s a webinar from ALA on library safety. Perhaps either my colleague or myself can attend. Will they have some solutions? Maybe. But perhaps most important for right now – librarians and library publications should be TALKING about this subject. I can tell you that working with the NJ Ref section I will push for at least a discussion of this topic.